A Few New Astro Friends!

Thanks Keith and yes they are for free...

www.tinypic.com

To avoid contributing to bandwidth gluttony, I started keeping all my images on my own website and just posting the links. If the image is 'included' as an image in the body of the post, even if the image is 'off-site', is that good for IFAS bandwidth?

Confused...

If you want to be picky including the image will actuall be better for THIS servers bandwidth.

a link:
<a href="yourdomanin/image.jpg">sometxt</a>

a img:
<img src="youdomain/image.jpg" />

You see its less bytes

html is just pointers when it comes to images, pointers for the client (browser) so it will not use bandwidth from this server when your include your img in to the body and are hosting it off-site

Hi folks,

A few answers to peoples questions.

If the images are not stored on the IFAS server it does not contribute to the IFAS bandwidth. Basically when your browser downloads a page, the first thing it gets is the basic code for the page. It then will go off and get the images from wherever they are located. You can either post the links or use the img tags to embed your images.

There is no particular size at which you will be on the recieving end of the bandwidth watchers wrath! If I see a post with an overly large image, you'll get a mail from me asking to resize it. Similarly if your image shows up in the site statistics as one of the highest bandwith files you'll get a mail from me. I'm not interested in setting hard requirements and enforcing them, its just if I notice something I'll drop you a mail.

The free image hosting sites that I know about are:

www.tinypic.com/
www.flickr.com
imageshack.us/

My personal favourite is flickr because of the way it allows you to tag and search images. www.flickr.com/photos/search/tags:irelan...tronomy/tagmode:all/
for example will show you all the images that people have tagged with the words Ireland and astronomy.

We are not looking at shutting down the files section, its used for hosting more than pictures and for many people its easier to keep everything on the one site rather than having to learn how to use tinypic etc. Even if we did we would still probably end up over quota as the boards themselves are now so popular!

Thanks to those of you who do store images offsite. Its a great help and very much appreciated. As I said we wont be shutting down the files section, but we would encourage users to check out the free image hosting sites as an alternative.

Cheers,
~Albert

Thanks Eirik - that's an interesting point. I know its a pain to go off-site so I'll just link to the image in furture without the fear of the Bandwidth Garda's wrath

I think the other point, regardless of bandwidth issues, is that if a large image is posted, you end up having to scroll the window to the right, including all the reply messages following it. That's a pain in the bottom for me...

I stick to about 650 pixels wide and it seems to work...

Cheers

Dave

You see its less bytes

Thankfully we are not that bad!

For those that include links to images: If you highlight the link then click on the Img button in the editor it will embed the image inline.

So
[code:1][img]http://www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/files/1131240067-IMG_0996.JPG[/img][/code:1]
gets you

yup
Another thing, with the image included, everytime some one opens the post it will now be YOUR server that get the requests. But i dont think you should be conserned about that.

Its a hole nother deal when this forum hosts for everyone. Adds up quickly

I prefer images inside of the posts. Because you can then place a txt under or over it describing the image ect. But the image should be right size. Like 650 px is good, with the userinfo on the left it then adds up to about 750px and most ppl today got a screen resoulution at 1024x768 and up.